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Timberline School students and their teacher, Nadine Messer, in Vale, Ore., pose with Bruce Walker, Nobel Prize physicist, who presented a plaque and trophies following the 2008 Idaho Conference science fair.Fritz Heid, seventh-grade student, shows his science experiment at the Idaho Conference science fair.Fritz Heid, seventh-grade student in Vale, Ore., receives a third place trophy from Bruce Walker.

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Timberline Students Win Science Awards

Timberline Adventist School, near Vale, Ore., came away from Idaho Conference's annual science fair with awards in two different grades and an overall achievement trophy.

Held April 8 at the Eagle Adventist Christian School in Eagle, Idaho, a number of Adventist elementary schools throughout southern Idaho and eastern Oregon participated in the fair. Judges, including a physicist, an astronaut and an artist, spent the morning talking to students, who were on hand to show and explain their experiments.

In the afternoon students were divided into two groups: grades 1–4 and grades 5–8, for science activities. Younger students wrote messages in invisible ink and then decoded them using a variety of methods with Marilyn Gantz, Meridian, Idaho educator. Older students made robots under the direction of David Pitcher, Eagle School principal. Fritz Heid, a Timberline Elementary seventh-grade student, was the only student able to successfully operate his robot within the given time limit.

Concluding the day's activities was an awards assembly. Timberline won first place in the first-grade division for a helicopter experiment, showing which materials make the best-flying propellers. In the seventh- and eighth-grade division, Heid won third place for his electric motor experiment showing which gauges and wire wraps work best.

After the fair, on May 20, Bruce Walker, one of the judges and a physicist on the team that received the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for their discovery of the quark, visited Timberline School to speak and present engraved plaques and trophies.